Apartheid allowed South Africa to flourish like no other country in Africa and when it was dismantled more than ten years ago, the average life expectancy quickly plunged ten years (and it has now returned to former levels).
Supporters of Israel react aghast when Israel is called an apartheid state, but if apartheid means that one ethnic group has privileges that another ethnic group does not, then Israel is an apartheid state (though nothing like apartheid South Africa). I see nothing wrong with Israel being a Jewish state that favors Jews.
If Israel were less nationalistic and less discriminatory against Arabs, it would cease to exist.
Saree Makdisi, a professor of English and comparative literature at UCLA, and the author of “Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation” writes in the Los Angeles Times:
Meanwhile, Palestinian citizens of Israel must contend with about 50 state laws and bills that, according to the Palestinian-Israeli human rights organization Adalah, either privilege Jews or directly discriminate against the Palestinian minority. One of the key components of Israel’s nationality law, the Law of Return, for example, applies to Jews only, and excludes Palestinians, including Palestinians born in what is now the state of Israel. While Jewish citizens can move back and forth without interdiction, Israeli law expressly bars Palestinian citizens from bringing spouses from the occupied territories to live with them in Israel.
The educational systems for the two populations in Israel (not to mention the occupied territories) are kept largely separate and unequal. While overcrowded Palestinian schools in Israel crumble, Jewish students are given access to more resources and curricular options.
It is not legally possible in Israel for a Jewish citizen to marry a non-Jewish citizen. And a web of laws, regulations and military orders governing what kind of people can live in which particular spaces makes mixed marriages within the occupied territories, or across the pre-1967 border between Israel and the occupied territories, all but impossible.
Mac* says: Regarding defending apartheid, the problem comes from the philosophical questions raised by utilitarianism and democracy. I don’t think the issue of right or wrong comes into play if you are looking at things in a vacuum, but when you interpose certain bedrock principles underlying what so many people consider “Judeo-Christian values” such as the Golden Rule, you can see where this breaks down and how easy it is to call something “wrong.” It is better to be more precise and avoid the morality issues all together. This is the reason that totalitarian regimes have long pointed out that they do a better job of taking care of their poor than the capitalist democracies. In the old Soviet Union, everyone was guaranteed work, food and housing. In essence it was a more equal society, although there was a nomenklentura elite.
The problem the Israelis and the white South Africans had was that they were based, in the case of South Africa on the superiority in implementing and maintaining western values (education, law, industry, work ethic, religion) over African values. As the world shifted more and more to multiculturalism and cultural relativism, and as time has passed from WWII, anything associated with racial differences is considered akin to being a Nazi, the South African government was living on borrowed time.
Regarding Israel, a major question is how can a Western Colonial state, created in the midst of a hostile Arab population survive. First, religious Jews deny it is a Western Colonial state, believing instead that it was given to them by God and that any Arabs who are there are going to governed by the way the Bible teaches us to treat strangers in our land. For the more secular Jews, they rationalize how they treat Arabs as something necessary to their survival. In fact, its pretty clear from reading books about Palestine under the British Mandate, that Arabs and Jews could coexist without too many problems. It’s also pretty clear from more recent historical works by Benny Morris, and the immediately recent book by Ari Shavit, that the Israelis were the aggressors in the war of Independence, that they committed war crimes and brazenly violated agreements with local Arabs to extirpate them from areas the Israelis deemed important.
At this point, the Israelis want to forget history (except when they can use it to justify their actions) and the Arabs want to force the Israelis to confess their original sin in the creation of the state and engage in acts of atonement.
Obviously that is not going to happen, so in Israel, it is a question of might makes right, and the implications of that around the world are not good. This means that everywhere the weak are vulnerable to the strong.
In many ways that is the reason the US is undergoing such paroxysms now. The constitution and the laws and regulations that have been enacted have been ostensibly to protect the weak from the strong preying on them.
Now the truly strong — the military industrial complex, the financial industry — preys on the middle classes, and the government does nothing. Yet the perceived weak — gays, women, minority — have the government enacting policies which not only protect the weak, but also allows them to prey on the middle class, through things like affirmative action, or the overpayment of insurance premiums under Obamacare to support the indigent, welfare, section 8 housing the like.
So you can’t just isolate that within South Africa, the standard of living, the crime rate, the general honesty of the government and wise spending on infrastructure were so much better than under the ANC, and you can’t compare the standard of living of the Israeli Arabs living under Jewish Rule to living under self rule. As Meir Kahane pointed out, that it an insult to the Arabs for the Israelis to think that because they provided toilets and a sewer system that the Arabs should be grateful to live under Jewish rule. He said that Israeli’s who say we took a desert and made it into a garden would be properly rejoined by the Palestinian Arab saying yes, but it was our desert and not our garden. I understand the pragmatic reason that the Israeli’s take the position vis a vis the Palestinians that they do, but again the implications of this don’t bode well in other parts of the world, including the U.S.
